Slanted Pictures in Shifting Frames
by Niamh St. George
Summary: One person may look at her and see a soldier bent on revenge against the race that razed her home and slaughtered her family, while another may see that same soldier trying to save what lives she could in an impossible situation. Trying, but failing all the same. Some days even she isn't sure which she is.


_"There are no facts, only interpretations."_

_~Friederich Nietzsche _

Thena Shepard knows.

She knows what it's like to have her family ripped away, to watch the only home she's ever known burn and burn and _burn,_ lighting the night sky despite the smoke blocking the stars. She is intimately familiar with the pain of loss, of the reminder—the reminder every day—of the life stolen from her when it was barely beginning. There is not a day, still, she does not think of Mindoir, think of her family. Usually those thoughts are fleeting. Usually those memories are a quick pang, an emotional paper-cut she is able to acknowledge and move past—move _beyond_.

Because she has made something of herself, and she knows her family would be proud.

Oh, but that part isn't entirely true, is it?

Forehead pressed against the window, she exhales, her breath fogging the glass. The room is well-appointed for a cell; it's got a nice view, at least, but it isn't the view she necessarily wants. What she wants is a pristine cargo bay thick with the scent of metal and gun oil; the CIC's hushed, controlled chaos; the main battery's low, constant hum, reminiscent of its usual inhabitant's flanged voice; her own admittedly absurdly large quarters with its admittedly absurdly empty fishtank. It's a view she may never see again. She knows this, though she has not quite come to accept it yet; imagining someone else commanding the _Normandy_ leaves a bitter taste upon her tongue. Turning herself in and handing over the ship was difficult enough. She's not yet ready to consider the Alliance's plans for the vessel, or for her.

Being back in Vancouver, looking out at this view—it's the same skyline, but from a different angle—the sight brings back other memories for her, memories of being eighteen, angry, and determined to prove herself to people who'd been ready to write her off, to consider her a lost cause, a PR blemish to sweep under the rug and forget about forever.

She cannot shake the sensation she's come full circle.

_"Did you know I didn't get to say goodbye to any of my family? None of them knew I was going to make it out safely. None of them knew I was going to survive. None of them know it—or can know it—now. So I'm sorry. I'm sorry if I didn't jump at the chance to be placed in a foster home. I didn't want to be be stuck into a family of strangers. You're asking me why I avoided the Alliance for two years? That's why. Batarians took my family away, and the Alliance wanted to give me a new one that I never asked for and didn't want. Fact is, I would rather've been on my own than have a family of strangers forced on me."_

If she closes her eyes the scent of midnight-oil coffee tickles the edges of her memory. How many nights had she sat up in a room like this—minus the guard, naturally—cramming for her A2ET exams? How many times had she wanted to give up and walk away—and how often had a message from Tyrrana come at just the right moment, saying just the right things to push her on?

_Tyrrana_, she thinks, eyes blinking open with a start as she stares at her translucent reflection in the window. That's a name she hasn't thought about in… too long. One more name in a long list of people who'd wanted her to do well, people she'd wanted to make proud.

If Tyrrana's still alive somewhere, Thena's sure she's heard about Aratoht, about her incarceration (her death above Alchera, too, but Thena isn't prepared to imagine her mentor's reaction to that news). Tyrrana always had a way of finding things out, whether they'd been made official or not. There's no doubt she knows the intrepid Commander Shepard was discovered to have Cerberus ties.

_"Here's the thing about being someone else's golden child, Thena. You're still _someone else's _golden child. You're still a soldier, and you still get your orders from somewhere else. And even fast-track superstars are part of the chain of command; they're expected to follow orders that come down from their superiors that came down from _their_ superiors and so on. There's hell to pay if you don't follow orders. Know that. Know it down to your bones." _

If Tyrrana's still alive, if she's out there, she knows about Aratoht. About the Alpha relay. Over three hundred thousand lives lost. No survivors.

If she's out there, she's not proud.

_"But the time's going to come when you're going to get a bad order. A really bad order. And your choice is going to be whether to live with the consequences of insubordination or live with yourself for following a bad order you know in your gut you know you never should've followed."_

The problem is, Thena still isn't sure whether she followed a bad order, or if she performed badly on the mission. A matter of perspective, she supposes; the way something looks at a distance is nothing like the way it looks up close, or from a different angle. One person may look at her and see a soldier bent on revenge against the race that razed her home and slaughtered her family, while another may see that same soldier trying to save what lives she could in an impossible situation. Trying, but failing all the same.

Some days even she isn't sure which she is.

Warning the batarian colony had made no difference in the end. Their blood is on her hands. The Hegemony is screaming for her head. She keeps waiting for—for _something_ to descend on her like Damocles' sword, dangling by fraying horsehair. Retribution, perhaps. Or perhaps she's waiting for the guilt that hasn't shown up yet, absent like an increasingly late guest to a party. There's been plenty of anger, but guilt hasn't surfaced yet.

A bad order, or badly executed?

It depends on how you look at it. Thena just isn't sure how she does look at it.

###

_The grizzled face fades from the screen, which lightens and fades to transparent again._

_Hackett's missions have never turned out particularly well for Thena, and she's reasonably certain this time will be no exception._

_Aratoht._

Fuck_._

_She paces from one end of the room to the other and back again._

_This is a bad idea. The worst idea._

_It's not the first time she's been sent on a solo mission and it certainly won't be the last, but even so there's something about this one hitting her in all the wrong places. No, the problem isn't Hackett, not necessarily, though given a few of the assignments he'd shot her back in the day, there had been a time she'd been all but certain the old man had had it in for her._

_The problem, she suspects, is Hackett's perspective on the assignment. He came to her, someone no longer any part of the Alliance—and only very barely a Spectre—relegated to the Terminus System where she can't cause any trouble. There's a reason he came to her as opposed to going through official channels; she can't help but believe it's something more complicated than wanting to keep the op quiet. _

_How would Hackett extract a deep-cover operative if he hadn't had the intrepid Commander Shepard at his fingertips? Such extractions have been executed in the past, and without resorting to entities outside the Alliance. Which only means there's another explanation why he wants her to go alone—one beyond what he's told her. A bigger, deeper, possibly uglier reason—or at least a more damning one. Shepard doesn't know what it is, or if there's more than one, but she doesn't like the way the secrecy of it settles unevenly along her spine, tickling her instinct unpleasantly. _

_She doesn't like it one damned bit._

"You keep this quiet, Shepard, and there's nothing to worry about."

_Oh, that wasn't ominous at all. She stops on the third or fourth circuit around the room, pausing in front of the fishtank, which—at that moment—has fish in it. Actual living fish._

_"Nothing to worry about, my ass," she breathes, frowning, scarcely registering the eel as it twists by._

_Every damned thing about this op feels wrong. So wrong, in fact, it is startlingly tempting to ignore Hackett's order altogether. It isn't as if she's Alliance anymore; she's going down to Aratoht as a favor (and it's one hell of a favor). _

_Unfortunately, a lifetime of following orders isn't the sort of thing she can shrug off easily. And perhaps that's part of why this has her so unsettled; Thena trusts her people—knows them better than Hackett does—and she's got one hell of a squad on her ship. It's not a question of whether she can go down to Aratoht alone—obviously she can. It's a question of whether she _should_. In her experience, a mission's success is never lessened when the right people are involved._

_But it would be her ass if—if for whatever reason—the mission went sideways because she'd done it her own way. The Alliance isn't Cerberus and Hackett sure as hell isn't the Illusive Man, and if anyone could warn Hackett about her propensity to do things her own damned way it's that son of a bitch._

_Still._ Still._ Insofar as Thena's instinct is concerned, the suggestion that there'll be nothing to worry about as long as she keeps her mouth shut does less than nothing to inspire confidence. It's not so much that she doesn't trust Hackett, it's more that she doesn't trust the world—the galaxy—she lives in anymore. Admiral or not, Hackett's power is limited, and if the op does go sideways while she's planetside, the last thing she's going to do is leave the crew to wonder where the hell she went gone off to. Her people deserve better than that. _

_The Alliance has made it more than clear they are not "her people" anymore. _

_And she is not theirs._

###

Perhaps it's foolish to be so wrapped up in a single decision when the whole op from start to finish was a clusterfuck wrapped in a train wreck inside something very, very pear-shaped. So Thena combs through events backwards, looking at her choices and what consequences they wrought. It's more than a simple game of would have/could have/should have. She's analyzing her decisions, her reasoning, her thought process, her _strategy._

But no. No, the cards had been stacked against her from the start. There'd been no way to tell Dr. Kenson had been compromised until it was already too late. Bad intel leads to bad decisions, which in turn leads to a botched mission, which, in this case, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of colonists.

And yet, if she'd never gone at all, if she'd turned down Hackett, the countdown would have continued, and they'd all be up to their eyeballs in Reapers now with trillions lost and more deaths stacking up by the day.

_Unsatisfactory,_ she thinks with a deep scowl as she pushes away from the window.

In an ideal world, she'd have listened to her gut and taken a squad down despite Hackett's orders. It wasn't as if she'd been an Alliance soldier at the time—it's not as if she's one now—so the question of insubordination is a moot point. In this ideal world she'd have taken Garrus and Thane because you couldn't ever have too many snipers, and someone with infiltration skill would've been invaluable at the time given the fact she's always been roughly as stealthy as a bulldozer.

There was still the problem of Kenson's indoctrination; there was no guarantee even with Thane and Garrus on the mission Kenson would have misstepped. There was a chance—a slim one, though, and Thena isn't fond of hindsight speculation—two other pairs of eyes and ears, two other perspectives might've caught something she'd missed.

Ah, but that's still speculation—and it's an easy trap to slip into when you've got nothing but time on your hands. The longer she sifts through her memories, playing and replaying every conversation had between Aratoht and Project Base, the more frustrated she becomes, because Kenson hadn't let a goddamned thing slip.

###

_She has to hand it to Garrus: he's got a hell of a poker face. _

_"You're doing _what_?"_

_Unfortunately for him, she's getting better and better at reading his tells. And right now? He's not happy. Not that this news is surprising. She's not happy either._

_Tugging a hand through her hair, she paces the length of the battery again; moving has always helped her think, though right now the pacing isn't doing much good. A few laps around the cargo bay would be better. "Which part are you unclear on?"_

_"How long have you got?"_

_Thena stops, tossing Garrus a look over her shoulder; he shrugs after a moment and beckons to her. He's not even trying to keep the stoic mask in place anymore; his browplates are drawn together and his jaw is set, mandibles pressed tight to his face. Shepard pulls in a breath and lets it out in a hiss, jamming her hands in her pockets as she joins him at the console. _

_"Officially, I wasn't supposed to have told you."_

_"But you did."_

_"I did."_

_His gaze turns shrewd after a moment. "Because you got a wild hair to disobey Hackett—something, let's be clear here, I completely support—or because you've got a bad feeling you might not be coming back?"_

_Another inhale, another exhale before she finally says, "Neither. Not entirely, at any rate." At Garrus' curious look, she shrugs. "Call it insurance."_

_"Insurance," he echoes, thoughtfully._

_The grin she shoots him is a crooked one; she doubts it hides any of her misgivings about this mission, but concealment isn't what she's going for. "I can't very well leave you in charge without telling you where I'll be in the meantime, can I?"_

_His double take is probably more satisfying than it should be. "Shepard," he says in that slow, cautious drawl of his, "you, ah, haven't…experienced any recent head trauma you're not telling me about, have you?"_

_"This coming from the guy who took a rocket to the face," she tosses back, but though her grin is fixed in place, she's turned her body towards him, placing her hand over his. This is still… so very new, what they're doing. So new, in fact, sometimes it's unnerving how right it feels. She laces her fingers around his and squeezes gently, until Garrus squeezes back. "No," she says quietly, somberly. "No head injury. My judgment's sound as it ever was."_

_Garrus hums a low, rumbling note that is almost a chuckle, his eyes warming with humor. "I would like you to note that I'm not taking advantage of that, even though you left yourself wide open."_

_"Who else would I leave myself wide open around, if not the guy watching my six?"_

_Good humor subsides, just a little, as he brings his palm to her cheek. "Can't watch it that well if I'm up here while you're not."_

_"Sounds like you'll just have to trust me to improvise then, doesn't it?"_

_He blinks once, narrowing his eyes slightly; the hand resting against her cheek twitches, a ghost of movement against her skin. "You're serious."_

_"About leaving you in charge? Entirely." _

_A heartbeat of silence ticks by. Another._

_"You don't have to go down there alone, you know."_

_"That… has occurred to me." She doesn't pull away. On the contrary, she presses into Garrus' palm like a cat. "I know Hackett's coming to me either because he doesn't want to go through official channels, or he _can't_. I also know I am under no formal obligation to do this his way. It's a… professional courtesy I'm extending him, nothing more. I know that as far as Hackett's concerned, I'm not much better than a highly-trained mercenary he knows can get the job done."_

_"Except that mercs get paid to risk their necks."_

_Her expression turns arch. "Someone sounds like he's tired of scanning for platinum."_

_He tilts his head and gives her that look; there's no question about it, she has no choice in the matter—she has to come back. "Shepard…"_

_"I know," she relents, archness melting into rueful affection as she exhales a sigh, turning to press a kiss to his palm. "Believe me, I know."_

###

She doesn't get visitors—none beyond Vega, her guard, a cocksure lieutenant with a swagger that reminds her too sharply of her brother, Jason. Jason, who'd be thirty-four this year—older than this kid they'd assigned to her, and yet perpetually eighteen.

She doesn't talk much to Vega; he doesn't seem to mind. But he is the only company she has, day in and out, whether she likes it or not. So when Anderson turns up, it's both a surprise and a welcome diversion. Normally his presence brings with it news—news of her trial, usually. And while these visits aren't social calls, Anderson occasionally manages to slide the occasional veiled reference into their conversation to let her know her crew are thinking of her.

But today, when Thena catches his inscrutable expression, guarded and too carefully neutral, something goes tight in the pit of her gut.

"Lieutenant," Anderson says, addressing Vega. "I think you might find this to be a fine opportunity to stretch your legs."

Something—uncertainty, or more likely curiosity—flickers across the marine's expressive face, but only for a moment.

"Yes, sir," he says, after the briefest hesitation. And Vega, obedient as any Alliance soldier, salutes the admiral and leaves them to their privacy. Once he's gone, Anderson hands her a slip of paper—she's not allowed an omni-tool for a multitude of reasons—and she opens the note. There, scrawled in what she assumes is Anderson's hand, are two numbers.

"You're going to be hearing about this later," he begins and then pauses, brows furrowing. "I thought it might be better if I were the one to deliver the news."

"What news?" she asks, nodding at the paper. "What is this?"

"Intelligence has managed to break down the casualties on Aratoht."

She looks again, adding the two numbers together; sure enough, they equal three-hundred, five-thousand. It's how they're broken up that puzzles her. "So what's the difference between them?"

"The first number indicates how many free batarians were on the colony, versus—"

She looks at the numbers, then looks again. They don't make sense. "This can't be right."

Anderson's expression doesn't budge. "It is."

"Ninety thousand free batarians and over _two hundred thousand—_"

"Slaves," he supplies as gently as he can. He's always been good at reading her, and now is no exception.

Slaves. She killed over two hundred thousand people who never had any business being on Aratoht anyway. Bile rises in her throat and she swallows it back, but her stomach clenches and roils and threatens to revolt all the same. When she does speak, the words come out forced between her teeth. "So do we know if the Hegemony is actually pissed about those ninety thousand batarians, or is it more about all those lost _possessions_?"

"Shepard." His tone carries a warning. Unfortunately, it's a warning she's not overly inclined to heed.

"I mean, that's what you're saying here, isn't it? We're not actually talking about three-hundred five-thousand batarians here, are we?" she says, that deep, old anger surfacing again, causing the strain in her voice as she fights to keep the volume under control. What she wants to do—what she wants to do more than anything else—is shout and swear and scream until she's hoarse with it. She wants desperately to break something.

What she wants most to do is the thing she absolutely cannot do.

So instead, with long-legged strides she paces one end of her cell to the other. Slaves. _Slaves. _Thousands upon thousands of them—maybe even some taken from Mindoir—dead, _disintegrated_, and she'd been the one to pull the fucking trigger. Not three-hundred five-thousand batarians. _Two-hundred fifteen-thousand slaves._

Her head is pounding with that number, over and over and over again.

From behind her Anderson's voice is laden with apology. "I thought you deserved to know."

"Let me guess," she says with a harsh bark of humorless laugher. "Now you regret telling me?"

"Not exactly," he replies, coming to stand behind her by the window. "I knew you weren't going to be happy. Figured you'd be mad as hell over it."

"Glad to know I didn't disappoint," she says, biting off the words.

"There's no reason you shouldn't be mad—hell, it's a good sign you are. Those numbers mean something to you. In fact," he continues after a brief pause, "I'm betting they mean more to you than you know."

That's enough to make her stop and turn to look at Anderson over her shoulder, the fog of rage and years-old hurt lifting momentarily. "I don't follow."

"The Hegemony's trying to use your background against you," he explains with a deep exhale. "Trying to say this was a deliberate attack on a batarian colony—"

"Because of Mindoir?"

"Exactly." Thena falls quiet a moment and Anderson takes another step closer. "Given this intel, by their own logic you wouldn't have destroyed the colony if you'd had any other choices in front of you. That asteroid wasn't going to be delayed. The explosion wasn't going to be stopped. You came in too late to save the day the way you wanted, so you saved it the only way you could."

Her expression must have conveyed every last ounce of her skepticism, because Anderson laughed, a soft, rueful, humorless sound. "You don't look like you believe me."

"With respect, can't say that I do, sir."

"You did all you could. I think you're too close to things to see them right now, but I imagine you'll come around to it eventually."

As always, Anderson has more faith in her than she does.

###

_They'd been looking for reaper tech._

_They'd been _looking_ for reaper tech._

_The CIC is quiet, ominously so. No one has said a word since she came on board, bloody and stinking of smoke and sweat, making a beeline from the main airlock to the CIC where she now stands over the galaxy map, watching the alpha relay blink, blink, blink, before finally going dark._

_It's gone. They're all dead._

_She's destroyed a relay and annihilated a colony. There will be repercussions, but the enormity of what she's done has risen up all around her and she cannot see the consequences yet. They'll come; they always come, sooner or later, and they won't be pleasant or brief._

_It isn't until her hands begin to ache that she realizes her fingers have clenched around the railing._

_Relay, destroyed. Colony, annihilated._

_Reaper invasion, postponed._

_It was supposed to have been a simple extraction. But how—how can anything be simple, how can anything be _assumed_ to be simple when the involved parties have been searching for reaper tech?_

_Indoctrinated. All of them._

_Goddamn, fucking reapers._

_Relay, destroyed. Colony, annihilated._

_But the fight is still coming. Those lost lives have bought them time, but how much? How much time is three-hundred thousand lives worth? Months? A year? What has she purchased with this bloody currency?_

_She stares hard at the spot on the map where Aratoht had been._

_How much time has she bought? How many seconds was each life worth?_

_"Shepard?" Joker's voice is tinny across the comm, scraping across her concentration. "Doc Chakwas is waiting for you in the medbay."_

_She closes her eyes. The red spot that had vanished from the map still glows brightly behind her eyelids._

_"Be there in a minute."_

_She has a report to compose first._

###

A bad order, or one badly executed?

The question haunts her, lingering at the back of her skull like an echo, like ears ringing after gunfire, like the smell of thermal clips after ejection.

She never should have gone alone; given her experience with Saren and all she knew about indoctrination, she should have known, and if she couldn't have known, she ought to have suspected something was amiss the very moment Kenson mentioned the artifact.

Too close, too far away.

Being too close to the artifact was as bad as being too close to the reapers themselves. They damaged perception, imposing their own, pushing and nudging and molding thoughts until they had a useful puppet to follow out their orders.

But being too far away from it all wasn't any better. Those people didn't believe they existed at all. They used air quotes and cast aspersions on her judgment and her sanity.

And there Thena was, right in the middle.

She should have _seen_. Perhaps she blames her failure to see the reality on her decision later.

Bad order or badly executed?

She wishes she knew where Tyrrana was. Not that she's allowed visitors. Not that she's allowed to communicate with anyone at all. Not that she really wants to _face_ her guardian, her mentor, her friend—not after all this. Thena presses her palms against the cool glass and closes her eyes. A familiarly assessing amber gaze surfaces all too easily in her memory.

_Did you do all you could?_

She exhales, hard.

_That's no answer, kiddo. Did you do all you could with the intel given to you?_

_Yes_, she decides. The word tastes foul, even though she hasn't spoken it.

_No use imagining variables that weren't available to you. You did your best, you came back alive, and you completed the mission objective. You extracted the operative. Not your fault she was compromised._

Thena's jaw sets, mulishly.

_Not the answer you wanted to hear, was it? Tough luck. Now, the harder question—was it a bad order?_

Pushing away from the window, away from the sun setting on Vancouver, she presses a palm against her forehead. _I don't know_, she thinks.

_Sure you do. Oh, you think you don't because right now you're still not sure whether you're even you. Only natural you'd second guess every thought passing through your head. You're afraid to call a bad order a bad order because you don't know if that's you thinking or if it's the thoughts of whatever Cerberus brought back. You don't want to call it a bad order because you'd feel like less of a good soldier if you did, and if you aren't a good soldier, then what are you?_

Thena's breath catches. Somehow, even when she's not in the room—not on the planet, for that matter, or in the system—when her voice lives only in Thena's head, Tyrrana still manages to find the heart of the matter. Closing her eyes, she threads her fingers into her hair and fists her hands, not sure whether she's trying to shut off the torrent of words in that familiar voice, or trying to coax more forward. But she's spent too long actively preventing herself from thinking about Tyrrana at all; now, once she's started, she can't stop.

_I warned you about bad orders, golden child. I told you it was going to happen. Because, like it or not, your superiors are fallible. Imperfect. Doesn't matter what the reasoning was, it was still a shitty order. I don't give a single thin damn whether it was a deep cover op or not—would _you_ have naturally assumed anyone exposed to reaper tech was above being compromised by it?_

Thena has no answer for the flanged voice in her head. Unfortunately, it's damnably patient. She takes a deep breath in and out again. And then she thinks. Hard. Objectively.

The obvious answer is that Kenson and her team ought to have understood—more importantly, _paid attention to_—the known risks of exposing anyone to Reaper tech. Kenson ought not to have been the only project head; there should have been someone—a second—with the power to override her the absolute second she began acting erratic.

And yet, even if such safeguards had been put in place, there had been Saren and Benezia—strong minds, both of them.

Indoctrination was subtle. Insidious.

Hackett had made an assumption based on his perspective, based on his understanding of events. And it hadn't been enough. His assumption, his assessment of the situation, had been wrong. More than wrong. Disastrous.

And Thena had been left holding the bag. A bad order all around.

_Good. First step is admitting it. Doesn't mean you don't respect him. Doesn't mean he's a bad superior. What it does mean is this—he underestimated the enemy and overestimated a personal friend. The latter… well, we've all done that. But it's the former that'll get you into trouble._

"It won't happen again," she breathes, staring out the window at the familiar skyline. Twilight's settling, but Vancouver's putting off too much light. She lifts her eyes to the sky; a scant handful of stars have begun poking through the dusky purple-blue overhead.

It will not happen again.

###

_The doors close behind Hackett, leaving Thena alone in the medbay, the datapad containing her report still in hand._

_She's been a fool. She sees that now._

_No, of course he won't read her report. Doing so would have forced him to acknowledge—to admit to the Alliance—that she'd been on Aratoht at his request. This way Hackett can deny any involvement, and he can do so neatly, with very little fuss._

_"Like hell," she mutters, fingers tightening on the datapad. "EDI?"_

_The cool, detached voice floats down from the comm. "Yes, Shepard?"_

_"Notify Garrus and Miranda I want to see them in the conference room, ASAP."_

_"And if they ask what the meeting is in regards to?"_

_Her jaw is tight and her back is rigid—but these are not lingering injuries; this is righteous anger, and it warms her, pulsing hard through her veins. "The _Normandy's_ heading back to Earth," she replies tersely. "And come hell or high water, _somebody_ is going to know the truth as to why."_


End file.
